Westminster Abbey, near to Chaucer and Beaumont and Dryden; his adored lady having died in 1699 in this very house. She was not buried; for after all these years of self-effacement her devoted husband again appears, has her body embalmed, and carries it with him wherever he journeys. Mary Astell lived and died in her little house in Paradise Row; a near neighbour of, and a curious contrast to, the Duchess of Mazarin, whom she pointed at in her writings as a warning of the doom decreed to beauty and to wit, when shackled in slavery to Man, and so dis-weaponed in the fight against fate and forgetfulness. _She_ devoted herself to celibacy and “to the propagation of virtue,” as Smollett slily put it. Congreve satirized her, too; Swift stained her with his sneers as “Madonella;” Addison and Steele made fun of her in their gentler way. Doubtless there was something of _la Précieuse Ridicule_ to that generation in the aspect of this most learned lady, who wrote pamphlets and essays; in which, following More’s lead, she urged the higher education of her sex; and preached as well as practised persistent protests against the folly of those pretty women, “who think more of their glasses than of their reflections.” She inveighed much—this in our modern manner—against marriage, and woman’s devotion to man; putting it with point and pith, that Woman owes a duty to Man “only by the way, just as it may be any man’s duty to keep hogs; he was not made for this, but if he hires himself out for this employment, he is bound to perform it conscientiously.” One good work of hers still survives. Failing to found among her female friends a College or Community for Celibacy and Study, she induced Lady Elizabeth Hastings—her immortalized as the Aspasia of the _Tatler_ by Congreve and by Steele, and to whom the latter applied his exquisite words, “to love her is a liberal education”—and other noble ladies to endow in 1729 a school for the daughters of old pensioners of the Royal Hospital; and this little child’s charity was the precursor and harbinger of the present grand asylum at Hampstead, which clothes, educates, and cares for these girls. * * * * *